A Christmas Wish for the Land Girls Read online

  About the Book

  Winter, 1942. Brenda and Joyce are just two of the girls who have joined the Women’s Land Army and are doing their bit for the war effort. But after months working on farms in the Yorkshire Dales, they’re looking for a fresh challenge.

  However, moving to billets high up in the remote fells means fewer creature comforts – and new hardships. Brenda and Joyce are about to discover that they will need more than a stiff upper lip to get through the winter months … and the drama they simply can’t escape.

  Despite the bitter cold, their fear for those away fighting and concern for family and friends, there is warmth to be found in faces old and new, and plans for a jolly Christmas are afoot.

  But when a child evacuee goes missing in the snow and tragedy strikes close to home, can their dearest wish – that all their loved ones stay safe this Christmas – possibly come true?

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Cast of Characters

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also by Jenny Holmes

  Copyright

  A CHRISTMAS WISH FOR THE LAND GIRLS

  Jenny Holmes

  For my dear friend and collaborator,

  Caroline Sheldon

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  LAND GIRLS

  Brenda Appleby – worked at Maynard’s butchers before she became a Land Girl

  Hilda Craven – warden at Fieldhead House hostel

  Joyce Cutler – farmer’s daughter from Warwickshire

  Kathleen Hirst – former hairdresser from Millwood

  Pat Holden – a recent arrival at Fieldhead hostel

  Grace Mostyn – daughter of Burnside’s pub landlord and blacksmith, married to Bill

  Joan Quinn – a recent arrival at Fieldhead hostel

  Una Sharpe – former worker at Kingsley’s Mill in Millwood

  Elsie Walker – former groom from the Wolds

  BURNSIDE VILLAGERS

  Cliff Kershaw – landlord of the Blacksmith’s Arms

  Edgar Kershaw – his son, an RAF gunner recently shot down over France

  Edith Mostyn – Land Girls representative, widow of Vince

  Bill Mostyn – her son, owns and runs the family tractor repair company, currently serving in the Royal Armoured Corps

  BURNSIDE FARMERS

  Judith Evans – an evacuee staying at Dale End Farm

  Joe Kellett – farmer at Home Farm

  Emily Kellett – his wife

  Peggy Russell – widow

  Roland Thomson – farmer at Brigg Farm

  Horace Turnbull – farmer at Winsill Edge

  Arnold White – owner of Dale End Farm, Attercliffe

  Hettie White – Arnold’s daughter

  Donald White – Arnold’s elder son

  Les White – Arnold’s younger son

  SHAWCROSS VILLAGERS

  Geoffrey Dawson – Shawcross’s vet

  Alan Evans – an evacuee staying with Reverend Rigg

  Evelyn Newbold – member of the Women’s Timber Corps

  Giles Pickering – Vet friend of Geoffrey Dawson

  Reverend Walter Rigg – Shawcross’s vicar

  Gillian Vernon – Colonel Weatherall’s niece

  Emma Waterhouse – housekeeper to Reverend Rigg

  Colonel Samuel Weatherall – owner of the Acklam Castle estate

  Fred Williams – landlord of the Cross Keys

  SHAWCROSS FARMERS

  Laurence Bradley – farmer at Black Crag Farm

  Alma Bradley – inhabitant of Black Crag Farm

  Muriel Woodthorpe – Alma’s aunt

  Bernard Huby – farmer at Garthside Farm

  Cliff Huby – his son, gamekeeper on the Acklam Castle estate

  Dorothy Huby – his daughter

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘Are you sure we should go ahead?’ Una Sharpe glanced at the circle of candlelit faces gathered around the table in the common room of Fieldhead Women’s Land Army hostel. A low fire settled in the grate, while outside in the dark night a strong wind gusted through the elm trees.

  Brenda Appleby set the Ouija board down on the table. ‘Yes, come along, Una; it’s only a bit of fun.’

  ‘Fun; that’s all it is.’

  ‘Where’s the thingumajig – the planchette?’

  Several high-spirited voices let an uneasy Una know that she was in a minority of one.

  Brenda produced a heart-shaped piece of wood from the box then placed it in the centre of the board. ‘Here it is. Now, do we all know what to do?’

  ‘We ask it a question.’ It turned out that, of all people, fun-loving, modern go-getter Kathleen Hirst was adept at contacting the dead. ‘Starting with an easy one, such as: “How many people are in this room?” Then we wait for it to give us an answer.’

  In the flickering candlelight Una studied the letters and numbers on the board. She ought not to be so silly, she told herself. What harm could there possibly be in joining in? And yet …

  ‘Ready?’ Brenda asked.

  ‘And willing!’ Kathleen was the first to place her finger on the planchette. ‘My Grandma Hirst was a dab hand at this lark. She could conjure up the spirit of her dead brother at the drop of a hat.’

  Five other fingers joined hers, delicately poised and ready to begin. Only Una hesitated. And yet … death was already far too present in this, the third year of the Second World War. Allied soldiers perished daily in the blazing deserts of North Africa. Naval men went down with their ships in the Atlantic. Not to mention the brave RAF boys brought down by ack-ack guns or blown to smithereens by their German counterparts. Following her gut feeling, Una scraped back her chair and stood up.

  ‘I’m sorry, girls; I have a letter to write,’ she said by way of an excuse as she made her way to the door.

  ‘To lover-boy Angelo, no doubt!’ Kathleen raised a critical eyebrow over Una’s affair with the Italian POW. ‘Mi amore, la-la-la!’

  Una ignored the cascade of light laughter from inside the room. In the cold, tiled hallway she bumped into Joyce Cutler who was descending the wide stairs in her thick Land Army coat and porkpie hat. She was on her way to help an elderly widowed neighbour who had telephoned the hostel to tell the warden that two of her pigs had escaped into the field behind the farmhouse.

  ‘Hello, Una. What are they up to in there?’

  ‘Nothing much. Some spiritualist nonsense, that’s all.’

  ‘Aha, not the old Ouija board? Who’s the ringleader? No, let me guess: Kathleen.’

  Una shook her head. ‘Brenda this time. I didn’t fancy joining in, though.’

  ‘I don’t blame you.’ Joyce picked up on her roommate’s uneasiness. She too had her doubts about this fashionable dabbling with the spirits of the dead. Not that she believed in it exactly – she just
thought it might lead to no good. ‘Listen, Una, I know Sunday is our day off and it’s already pitch black outside, but Peggy Russell has mislaid two of her prime porkers. I don’t suppose you fancy helping me to recapture the ungrateful blighters?’

  Una gave a quick nod then sprinted up the stairs. ‘Hang on a second while I fetch my coat.’

  ‘Bring a torch,’ Joyce called after her. ‘And we’ll need gumboots for that boggy field. I’ll meet you outside the back door.’

  In the dimly lit common room, Kathleen volunteered to ask the first question of the ghostly presence. ‘What year is this?’

  The girls leaned forward to concentrate on the heart-shaped planchette. Their pupils were dilated, their chapped, work-worn fingers trembled with anticipation. Slowly the counter started to move jerkily towards the number one. Sitting to Brenda’s left, Elsie Walker felt a small flutter of excitement. Number one, then nine, then four; the planchette gathered speed until it came to rest against the number two.

  ‘Well I never!’ Elsie laughed. She ran her free hand through her boyish, cropped hair. ‘Nineteen forty-two. It’s got that right, at least. Ask it something else.’

  ‘Here’s my next question,’ Kathleen began.

  ‘Hold your horses; it’s time to give someone else a turn.’ Brenda stepped in eagerly. ‘Right then, whoever you are, what is the first letter of your Christian name?’

  For a few seconds there was no movement. Each girl held her breath, caught between the urge to giggle and a sense that mighty, unknown forces could be at work. Elsie bit her bottom lip and cast a nervous glance at Kathleen. Suddenly the carved piece of wood slid smoothly towards the letter F.

  ‘“F”,’ Kathleen whispered as she looked around the table. ‘Who do we know from our pasts whose name began with an F? Could it be a Fred? Does anyone have a poor old Uncle Fred who came to a sticky end in the mud of a Flanders field?’

  The wide-eyed girls shook their heads.

  ‘Perhaps it’s a Frank.’ Elsie nudged Brenda with her elbow.

  ‘Is your name Frank?’ Even as Brenda asked the question, the memory of Frank Kellett flew into her head. It was coming up to a year since poor, lovelorn Frank had been found frozen to death on Swinsty Edge – curled on his side in the snow, his icy hand still clutching one of Una’s embroidered handkerchiefs.

  ‘Yes.’ The planchette shot towards the word printed in the top left-hand corner. At the same moment, the glowing cinders in the grate collapsed unnoticed and sent a hot ember and a shower of red sparks on to the hearth rug.

  As the disc moved, Elsie let out a squeal.

  Kathleen was unruffled. ‘Hello, Frank. We’re glad you could join us. Do you have a message for someone?’

  ‘Yes,’ the board told them.

  ‘You’ve come to talk to Una, haven’t you? Is there something special that you want to say to her?’

  Though Brenda had instigated the game and she kept her finger pressed lightly on the planchette, doubt wormed its way into her head. Perhaps this hadn’t been such a good idea after all. Thank heavens Una decided to make a quick exit, she thought.

  ‘Yes,’ the board answered promptly before the planchette moved back to the centre of the board.

  In for a penny, in for a pound; Kathleen pressed ahead. ‘Is it that you’ll always love her?’

  No one breathed. The wooden heart slid slowly towards the bottom of the board then shot swiftly up towards the ‘yes’.

  ‘Goodness gracious, can anyone smell burning?’ With a careless shove of the board across the table Elsie broke the mood. She jumped up and rushed to the other side of the room where the fallen ember had singed the rug. ‘Quick, someone; fetch a jug of water,’ she cried.

  Brenda turned on the overhead electric light then ran to join her. She seized some handy coal tongs and whisked the glowing cinder back into the grate. Then she stamped on the singed patch. ‘Panic over,’ she reported as Elsie returned with the jug. ‘But you’d better pour water over it, just in case.’

  Kathleen was the only one still at the table, putting the Ouija board back to rights and eager to continue their communion with the spirit world. ‘Someone turn off the light pronto. Let’s hope we haven’t lost Frank in all the kerfuffle.’

  ‘Let’s hope we have,’ Brenda countered. ‘The poor soul deserves to be left in peace after what he went through.’ Driven out in the middle of winter by his hard-hearted father, doted on by his mother who had nevertheless been unable to protect her simple-minded son, Frank Kellett had been an outcast and a victim all his life. ‘What do you say we play a nice game of whist and listen to the wireless instead?’

  ‘You two took your time.’ Peggy Russell’s poker-faced greeting was par for the course. The farmer’s widow stood in her doorway in her brown dressing-gown and carpet slippers, straight grey hair parted down the middle and tucked behind her ears, casting a doubtful gaze over Joyce and Una.

  ‘Yes, but we’re here now.’ Joyce waited for instructions while Una stamped her feet against the biting cold. Why did the wind always blow in so strongly from the west? she wondered. It must be to do with the steep valley sides of the Yorkshire Dales creating a funnel through which it gusted.

  ‘Pigs are loose in the back field.’ Peggy jerked her head towards the side of her stone-built farmhouse. ‘Two of them.’

  Joyce shone her torch across the farmyard. ‘And you want them back in their sty?’

  ‘No, I want them on a plate with a couple of fried eggs. Where do you think I want them?’

  Peggy’s sarcasm didn’t dent Joyce’s good humour. ‘Rightio, Mrs Russell – we’ll get on with it. Come along, Una.’

  As the two young women clomped across the flagged yard in their gumboots, they heard the distant drone of aeroplane engines, gradually growing louder. Quickly turning off their torches, they instructed Peggy to close her door.

  ‘Just in case it’s Jerry and he spots our lights,’ Joyce explained.

  Una listened carefully then offered her opinion. ‘They sound more like Lancasters to me. Probably RAF boys heading out of Rixley for an overnight raid on Munich or Saarbrücken.’

  Joyce paused by the gate leading into Peggy’s field. Every night the sound of planes flying overhead made her quake and go weak at the knees, knowing that her fiancé, Edgar Kershaw, might be one of the pilots setting out on what could well be his final mission. Best not to think about it. Best to get on with the task in hand. She opened the gate and stepped ankle deep into mud. ‘Here, piggies!’ she called into the darkness. ‘Here, nice little piggy-piggies!’

  ‘Spoilsport,’ Kathleen grumbled as Brenda turned on the wireless. ‘Who wants to listen to boring speeches on our night off?’

  ‘I do.’ Elsie sat down and put her feet up on a low stool, her neat, small figure dwarfed by the worn leather upholstery of the old-fashioned chesterfield. The other girls shrugged then wandered off to their rooms to write letters and darn socks.

  There was a whine of valves as the wireless warmed up. ‘It’s our duty as Land Girls to listen to what our prime minister has to say,’ Brenda opined. She found the station on the dial then plonked herself on the sofa beside Elsie while Kathleen stood with her back to the fire. ‘And let’s hope he gives us more good news from North Africa.’

  They’d tuned in just in time for the political broadcast and soon Mr Churchill’s lugubrious tones filled the stuffy, book-lined room. He spoke once more of Allied gains in Morocco and Algeria and of an American naval victory over Japan at Koli Point. General Montgomery was soon to launch a new offensive in Libya.

  ‘About time too,’ Kathleen remarked through a cloud of blue cigarette smoke. ‘We’ve been hanging on by the skin of our teeth up till now.’

  ‘Hush!’ Elsie and Brenda said together.

  Churchill’s voice growled on then built to a climax. He told the nation that the Desert army had forced Rommel into a humiliating retreat. ‘Now this is not the end,’ he warned them gravely. ‘It is not even the begi
nning of the end.’

  ‘You can say that again,’ Kathleen muttered.

  ‘Ssh!’ Brenda reached out to turn up the volume knob.

  ‘But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’

  ‘Hurrah!’ As Brenda clicked off the wireless, Elsie was genuinely heartened by the good news. ‘Things are changing in our favour at last.’

  Kathleen bent to stub out her cigarette on the grate then flicked the butt into the fire. ‘They’re certainly changing; any idiot can see that. But not always for the better.’ Her youngest brother, Vernon, a boy of eighteen, was the latest member of her family to have been conscripted into the army. Clothing coupons had been reduced again, forcing some of the girls at Fieldhead into desperate measures, including cutting up their old jumpers and turning them into socks.

  ‘Oh, Kathleen; since when did you turn into such a moaning Minnie?’ Elsie jumped up to put a disc on the turntable of the gramophone standing in all its mahogany majesty in the bay window. She chose a recent favourite then flicked a switch and carefully lowered the needle. There was a hiss of static before a jaunty baritone began with the words, ‘She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes.’

  ‘When she comes!’ Brenda and Elsie chimed in, tapping their feet in time to the music. They smiled and got ready to insert their own cheeky words into the next verse. She’ll be kissing six tall sergeants when she comes … ‘Coming round the mountain, coming round the mountain, coming round the mountain when she comes!’

  There was nothing nice about the little piggies that had escaped into Peggy’s back field. The two fully grown sows snorted and bolted, squealed when cornered then barged between Una’s legs, upskittling her and landing her in the mud.

  Joyce hauled her friend on to her feet as the runaway pigs galloped off into the darkness. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, ta. Nothing hurt apart from my dignity.’ Una adjusted her hat then thought ahead. ‘We need a weapon to herd them with – a pitchfork or a rake.’